Santa Fe County facing more recycling pressure after China balks

After China instated her ban on importing waste plastics in response to the Trump Organization's destructive trade policies some communities are learning to improvise.

It takes trucks, tub grinders and balers dedicated to specific materials on a regional scale to do recycling right. 

We sell millions of tons of salvage material to India and Asia to be recycled and tearing up our own ground mining for virgin minerals while steel, copper and rare earth metals are buried in landfills. Most plastics can be pyrolysized for fuel or added to asphalt. Japan recycles nearly 100% of her glass but the US has thousands of mountains of glass cullet from the municipal waste stream just waiting to be repurposed, yes, even for the silica used in hydraulic fracturing.

Online shopping is driving increased cardboard recycling and Albuquerque's plastic bag ban will go back into effect in August. Growstone, Inc. buys Albuquerque's glass and manufactures a medium for horticultural applications. In Nova Scotia, Goodwood Plastic Products Ltd. harvests shopping bags, food containers and peanut butter jars from the municipal waste stream then turns that material into synthetic lumber, wharf timbers, guardrail pilings and agricultural posts.

New Mexico surfs the bottom of the US for recycling but Maine does pretty well. Denver and Boulder, Colorado are among the best cities for doing recycling right. 

In Santa Fe County Reunity Resources has stepped up to compost food scraps, organics, wood and yard waste for garden soil while local recycling has increased to some 11,000 tons a year. 

For the past nine years, the team at the Buckman Road Recycling & Transfer Station has quietly soldiered on, sorting and processing Santa Fe’s waste. Previously, waste managers happily sent recycling to China on empty container ships making their return journey across the Pacific Ocean, where the materials found new life as recycled plastic products. But the sudden shift put US cities and counties in an awkward position. Instead of dumping the county’s recycling program, Santa Fe’s waste managers opted to dip into their savings to continue the service. In May of 2019, instead of shipping all recyclable materials to Friedman Recycling of Albuquerque—as BuRRT had done for years—the agency reopened its Material Recycling Facility after four years of closure due to unsustainable operations costs. The “MeRF,” first opened in 2007, enabled the site to process mixed paper and some mixed container waste, which includes sorting and baling the materials. [More Trash Costs More Cash]